The apparatchiks of the European Union establishment have one thing, at least, in common with serial rapists. They cannot accept that no means no. These people all want it really, they say. They’re not victims; they’re gagging for it. And they’ll love it really when we get our way with them. What the EU establishment wants, it gets. It takes, regardless.

 

Last week the Brussels nomenklatura once again proved that it won’t accept a no, this time from the electorate of Ireland. In June the Irish voters firmly said no to the European constitution, or rather the Lisbon treaty, or whatever obfuscation the Europhiles dreamt up to bamboozle us. The Irish were not bamboozled; they didn’t want the EU constitution. But no is not acceptable.

 

So last week Brian Cowen, the taoiseach and Europhile, reassured European leaders that he wouldn’t take no for an answer from his people. He has promised to make them vote again on the matter. Dick Roche, his European affairs minister, then opined, in the majesty of his democratic office: “From a constitutional point of view, there’s no other choice than a second referendum.”

 

What can he mean? The truth is the precise opposite. Such deliberate untruth, backing Mr Cowen’s promise to ignore his people’s vote, gives new vigour to the phrase barefaced effrontery. Against such wilful, shameless betrayal of the democratic process it is useless to protest; democracy is being undermined by democratically elected governments that don’t understand a constitutional no and smile benignly, or self-importantly, at our helpless rage.

 

Cowen and Roche should not be singled out for their effrontery. Jose Manuel Barroso, president of the European commission, is guilty of it too. Last week he brought out his weary charm on BBC television to ask, “Who are we to stop the Irish having a second referendum?” European leaders, far from stopping a second referendum in Ireland, have put huge pressure on its prime minister to have one or do something – anything – to deliver up an Irish yes.

 

Barroso must have known this; his question was shamefully misleading. Yet he actually said after last week’s Brussels summit meeting that “Europe has passed its credibility test”. The truth, once again, is the opposite. With its demand for an Irish yes, the EU has passed another incredibility test, in the manner of a deluded rapist.

 

Our own Gordon Brown, and Tony Blair before him, specialises in shameless, undemocratic effrontery, not least about the EU. Everyone knows Labour promised at the 2005 general election to hold a referendum on the proposed EU constitution. Everyone knows Blair and Brown broke that promise. Brown then sneakily signed the Lisbon treaty, knowing full well that most British voters would have said no. But Brown wasn’t having no. He wasn’t having democracy.

 

Brown does not restrict his astonishing effrontery to matters European. One of my favourite examples was his claim, many times repeated, that he had inherited “a broken economy” from the Conservatives. He must have known that the opposite was true, but he kept saying it.

 

I particularly enjoyed the way he and his ministers until recently went about intoning that Britain is one of the best-placed nations in the rich world to withstand the global crisis, since Britain is not overborrowed like other leading countries. The truth is the opposite. Clearly, they think they can get away with it. Perhaps they think we won’t notice or won’t care. Historians may say ’twas ever thus: all politicians lie.

 

I am not so sure. In my adult life I think there has been a growth in barefaced lies and deception in public office, along with a loss of respect for due process and respect for the freedoms of others. Maybe that’s just because, with the information revolution, we know so much more about what public men and women get up to. Or perhaps there has been a real change.

 

It’s an odd coincidence that while democracy and meritocracy have truly spread in the past 50 years, while all sorts of institutions and activities have been opened up to people who used never to get a look-in, political democracy seems to be coming under increasing threat.

 

A perfect example of this is the utterly incurious way Michael Martin, the Speaker of the House of Commons, and his unlucky placewoman Jill Pay, the serjeant-at-arms, were prepared to let the police into the Commons. I don’t believe there was any conspiracy; both were just too ignorant to do their jobs properly and had too little real understanding of the point of parliamentary procedure.

 

It may be snobbish, but it’s true. Neither is really qualified for the post by education or by experience. They both showed an unquestioning deference to the police. The rise of democracy was supposed to be the end of undue deference, yet here were the defenders of the people’s Commons touching their forelocks to the filth.

 

The price of freedom is not just constant vigilance – it must be informed and educated vigilance. And that vigilance is protected by procedure. Yet watchers over us are often less well informed and educated than they used to be.

 

You see small signs of it everywhere. In little committees for local purposes, or in big ones, you see a gradual disappearance of proper procedure. In the past, trade unionists and charitable ladies always used to go by the committee book. Now the tendency is towards friendly consensus, an open show of hands and an indifference to the minutes – to the record, in fact.

 

One of the problems behind Haringey’s first report on the death of Baby P was that the head of children’s services, in having two roles, had conflicts of interest – a serious procedural problem that was ignored. Procedure is deadly, of course, but it’s there to protect the truth-tellers and the vigilant, especially when they face undue pressure.

 

The EU is all too often indifferent to procedure, indifferent to the shameful fact that the auditors have not signed its accounts for years. In ignoring, jointly, the democratic procedures of other countries, it suborns individual Europhile leaders into an equal indifference. Procedure matters: it is there to protect us from, among other things, the barefaced effrontery of totalitarianism.